My God that's ugly
Roku rocks media streamers into UK
Roku has released its compact media streaming set-top boxes in the UK. With it comes BBC iPlayer support. The Roku LT and Roku 2 XS players - priced at £50 and £100, respectively - also come with Netflix support and all the usual free picture and video content sites, from Flikr to YouTube. Both boxes can connect across a 2. …
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Friday 10th February 2012 22:34 GMT Richard 12
Tom's Hardware ****ed up.
That particular 'story' was extrapolated from a garbled rumour they scraped from someone else and totally misunderstood*. They have since posted an update.
But please, carry on believing it. More chance of me getting one from the first batch in 10 days time.
The educational package is Q3 2012. This should not surprise anyone, on account of that being when schools start in the UK.
*I'm stretching to give T's H the benefit of the doubt here. I'm not exactly convinced they deserve it.
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Friday 10th February 2012 13:06 GMT Jason Bloomberg
Having your pi and eating it
Sure the Raspberry Pi could do what the Roku does, and probably more too. But this is a complete package, everything included, plug and play, firmware preinstalled and configured, power supply, case (like it or loathe it) plus a remote. It likely even comes with a user manual and warranty.
In short it's the difference between a commercial media player and tinkerer's delight. Each has their own place; horses for courses.
One advantage for the Roku is all the connectors are at the back unlike the Pi which will likely be a rats nest of wiring you might not like sitting under your TV. And how much would a Pi and the rest cost to turn it into an ersatz Roku? More importantly, the Roku is 'here and now' while the man in the street has no idea when they will be able to get their hands on a Pi given slipping delivery dates and unknown production batch sizes.
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Friday 10th February 2012 22:40 GMT Richard 12
That rather surprised me as well
It does appear that you can't stream from your local storage, which is weird.
- Netflix/Lovefilm is nice, but I've already got both iPlayer and ITV Player on my PVR.
I would like to stream back the recordings I've backed up, it's tedious to copy back and forth to the PVR.
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Sunday 12th February 2012 11:34 GMT ElNumbre
One feature Im NOT looking for.
In my experience, DLNA is a bit pointless. I've tried a variety of DLNA clients/renderers and servers and non of the combo's has worked reliably, consistently or properly. I'd much prefer to know that a device can mount CIFS or NFS and get a list of supported media types, rather than hoping and praying that DLNA client will be able to find, receive, decode and playback something indexed on the DLNA server.
Too many times has the missus said "why don't you just use a DVD" after 10mins of faffing, trying to get a movie to play.
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Tuesday 21st February 2012 13:05 GMT TonyHoyle
£50 version not available in the UK
The Apple TV or the WDTV Live seem better deals than this (and both are cheaper - it's saying something when you're charging more than apple!).
And since I can't really justify £100 for a Pi in a box (£75 buys you a case and a remote), I'll Pass.
Re release with sane pricing and I'll reconsider.